Bad news kept arriving and school comrades kept being posted missing, POW or dead. The old hands remaining told incessant stories about the Great War, just like Green had heard all his life. Most of the men here were young, filling in until joining the army as the call-ups had already started and the experienced men had gone. The newsroom hadn't changed since the Boer War and one editor's typewriter had separate keys for lower case and upper case letters. At sixteen, out of school and desperate to get a job rather than have an unpopular job forced upon him, Green managed to get accepted as a junior reporter in a local paper. The book takes us through school, country and town life, rugby, friendships which were later shattered by war service. I've read in the memoir of the Pullein-Thompson sisters that they had to import hay from Canada as there just were not enough men to do all the farm work at this time. Growing up in Leicester between the wars, Green was well used to seeing maimed returned soldiers his father was one of them. I love all Michael Green's books, which discuss rugby, acting or sailing, for example.
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